Warning / Disclaimer!!

The steps and procedures described in this article contain low level commands and/or information on editing configuration files directly on ESXi hosts, all of which should be done by professionals.Further more, the examples here can only be used as a general guidelines on how to trobuleshoot the described problems, and do not provide the exact solution. I am not responsibly for any damages done to your infrastructure by reproducing these steps. Proceed at your own risk!

The devil dwels in the details. Go into the VM folder and list the files inside:

Hmmm... delta disks. Nothing unusual.
Let's take a closer look. The error message for consolidation says: "Detected an invalid snapshot configuration". While the other error when attempting to clone the VM in attempt to resolve says that the disk file is missing. If we take a look at our VM files we can see that indeed, that particular disk file is missing - in our case: "CP Content-000001.vmdk"

Lets edit the VM file. It's the file with a .vmx extension. In our case that's the "CP Content.vmx" and navigate to the disks section. By the file name that looks like our first disk.

# vi CP\ Content.vmx
... from here on I can only show you with screenshots. The scsi part of this config file is where our disk files are described.
Like for example: scsi0:0 is for the first disk, scsi0:1 is for the second and so on.

We can see that scsi0:0.filename = "CP Content-000001.vmdk" and our file is missing i.e. the we only have CP Content.vmdk available and no delta disks for that disk. Go on and edit that line to match our present disk file.

This is how it should look like:

WARNING:
While pointing to disk files in the .vmx config file, you should always match the highest possible disk available for that scsi disk. In our case we only have the main disk and we didn't have a delta disk. This usually happens if snapshot consolidation is in progress, but it is interrupted somehow. However if for example we had "CP Content-000056.vmdk" in the VM directory but the config file points to a nonexistent disk like "CP Content-000100.vmdk" then we should edit the line and set it to point to that "CP Content-000056.vmdk" file. It is always the highest numbered disk in the working chain of snapshots that is the present disk. I know that this must be confusing for some of you. Read on more on the VM ware knowledge base on how snapshots work to understand this better.